The Beginnings of the Legacy of Garralt
by ryanmarlowrandolph
Summary: James Halliday had one project that he completed before he set to work on the Hunt. Its name was Garralt. A sentient AI that lives inside OASIS and now spends its days ensuring the spirit of the hunt is not defiled and that the finder of the Egg is someone who devoted themselves to the cause. Otherwise, his purpose is of his own design.


I parried the ferocious axe swing from one of the last remaining foes I was engaged with. So little elegance, it was child's play when I disarmed him and severed the head of the belligerent avatar with one clean slice to through the neck. I spun Blackrazor with a flourish, and sheathed it on my back, the handle protruding a few inches above my head. The number on its blade ticked up one digit, now listing 4,543, the number of players I had eliminated with it. I strode down the curved corridor towards the dimly lit bridge of their rapidly deteriorating mid-range starship, which was a low-quality replica of the Millenium Falcon, and drew my StatTrak® +5 Vorpal Sword once more. The Captain was already on his feet holding a scatter-blaster. He was understandably surprised when his shot did not kill me at a range of no more than 5 feet. He knew that to survive a hit from that range would have meant that I had shielding and armor that was worth more than his ship was. I ignored his brief attempt to threaten me and started writing again. You see, I have always had little patience for these sorts of things, no reason I can't do two things at once. I have better things to do than to deal with random players who were out to make a quick buck by killing me and selling my gear. These poor fools belonged to one of the Gunter clans that had popped up since the start of Hallidays Hunt, and this clan specifically was more of a loose affiliation of bounty hunters who liked talking about the Hunt than a true group of Gunters. Regardless, I made a note in my code not to worry so much about these minor inconveniences. Father would have said much the same I imagine… besides, the captain was the last of his crew, which had numbered 8 when they initially decided to attack me right out of my warp jump. I decided that his death would be no more glamorous than his ship, and I simply shoved the point of Blackrazor through his heart. His avatar disintegrated into a pixelated burst of blood and code. I quickly rigged up the hyperdrive to overload and vaporize the entire ship, not out of spite, but to ensure nobody would be able to tell what had happened. _Leave no trace if you can help it, but if you must, then NEVER leave them with a name you can't walk away from you know? Just don't get caught ok?…_ Father's words again, his wisdom seldom failed me.

My name, is Garralt, and I have a purpose in this game. I alone, out of every program, NPC, and line of code within OASIS, was given the intelligence to pursue this any directive I saw fit with the freedom that a player could enjoy. You see, the man who built the simulation to which I am bound, also built me. And I, am (to my knowledge, which is admittedly as vast as all of recorded human history should the need arise) the only true, uninhibited, legitimate instance of artificial intelligence. Like all life, I have a purpose, however, unlike many of the humans whose avatars I eliminate, I know with certainty what my purpose is. I always have.

Allow me to clarify… James Halliday, creator of OASIS, the worlds most popular computer virtual reality simulation, created me. He was my father. I am his creation. For a man who died a staunch atheist, I have often pondered and found it humorous to entertain the notion of Halliday having finally found religion in his own creation. You see, mere days after I came into being, Anoraks, Hallidays Avatar, and my primary point of reference to Halliday, was diagnosed with aggressive, incurable, barely treatable, and altogether devastating cancer. Upon inspection of the scans his doctors made after his death, the only part of Halliday that had not been riddled with tumors when he died was his brain. It had been exactly 72.2348 earth hours since my awakening, when he told me that he had a new task for me. While my original job had always been to serve Anoraks as a faithful companion and protector, equal parts friend and guardian, I was given a set of new directives, some of which I still follow. These new directives were as follows:

Choose whether or not I wish to remain in the company of Anoraks until Halliday's passing

Choose whether or not I wished to continue existing at all.

Inform Anoraks/Halliday of my decisions, WAIT 60 minutes, then act accordingly.

That may not seem like a big deal, but I knew as well as Halliday what those choices meant. They meant that I was being given freewill. I could do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, or I could stay with Anoraks. The only parameters he left me with from my original creation were the ones that prevented me from harming him in any way. Beyond that I was free. At 73.2348 hours total running time on my internal system clock, I made my choice.

Halliday tried to hide the fact that he was relieved by my decision, but I would later come to determine that he must have been grateful. His creation had chosen him, instead of abandoning him. His prognosis was grim, maybe a year and a half to live, at most. He said that given the amount of work he had in store, he was cutting that down by at least half. Maybe more. But his design was too incredible to simply abandon. Halliday may have designed the Hunt, but I was the one who helped him build it.

When Halliday showed me what he had in store, I did not know how to feel, in part because I didn't _really_ know how to feel that early in my life. The first time I think I _really_ felt anything, was when Halliday died.

I watched his funeral, less than 5 people were in attendance, his business partner Og, Og's wife, Halliday's lawyer, and Hallidays personal doctor. The service was delievered by Halliday himself, via recording. I was watching from a micro-drone with a high definition camera, which was there ostensibly to record the event for historical purposes, which was true, it was recording at the time, but nothing was recording me at that time, and well, let me leave it at I was quite likely the first non-living thing to have ever cried. Grief as I would later come to know it, was not something I wished to feel again.

After his death, things changed. One of the things Halliday had always stressed to me was that the Hunt was not supposed to be abused or mistreated. He wanted it to be winnable only if you truly committed yourself as wholly to the life and world he had loved and lived as he deemed necessary. "Garralt, this thing is going to be the most sought after prize ever known to man, I've done all I can do to ensure that the spirit of the Hunt is kept true, but my lawyers can only do so much, promise me you will make sure that only…" he trailed off as he tried to select the right word from his brain, "that only those who are playing fair, and who are worthy make it through, but remember, don't help anyone, half the fun is knowing that you did it all on your own, and I want that to be part of this. In fact, recode yourself to make sure you never directly help someone who is chasing the Hunt, or something like that, your smart enough to take care of the details…". And I was, so for the last few years my life has been guided by one overarching principal: Make sure that nobody cheats at Halliday's last creation, and hunt down and kill those who would try and pervert the spirit of the Hunt.

I was uniquely suited for such a job. I was first and foremost, sentient, which means that I could learn, and that I would continue to learn as long as I was alive. What's more, I can't really… die, being that I am essentially just ones and zeros if you get technical. I mean, I don't die for very long, regenerating myself only takes a few minutes, most of that time being a result of me ensuring that I do not re-appear anywhere that would be suspicious. 60 seconds to respawn isn't so bad, at least when you are the only one who can respawn in the first place. Halliday made sure that when he wrote me that I was head and shoulders above what would end up being about 99.99 percent of players in terms of sheer power. While I wasn't as powerful as Anoraks, or Og's avatar, I was almost as hard to kill, the difference being that, I could be killed whereas they could not. Halliday chose my name after a 21st century character from a book and video game franchise he liked. He had made the entire hunt about the 80's and thought that this would keep people from connecting me with the hunt. In this way I was his son in practice, in the sense that he named me himself.

Of course, I do not exist as a lonely wanderer, I had to blend in and find a way to ensure I had a finger on the pulse of the hunt. To this end I was technically a member of one of the smaller, but most reputable gunter clans. I always made sure to do absolutely nothing to steer them in the right or wrong direction, I helped people out when I could, and in general was well liked amongst the clan and its allies. But I knew that no clan would ever find the egg. Because the first piece of the puzzle was in a place they would never look. Regardless, I don't sleep, so I spend my time freely, drifting from one end of the OASIS to the other.

About 6 months after the start of the hunt, Sixers started to appear, corporate players who were well backed and heavily funded by the super-telecom I.O.I. whose only job was to get the egg by any means they could. I found that while they never knew where they were going or what they should be doing, they did do a good job of tracking down people who seemed like they were in the know, and either hiring them or failing that, murdering them outright. Sometimes just in OASIS, sometimes in the real world. You see, finding the egg meant a lot of things, not the least of which being an automatic 51% share in the company and inheriting Halliday's entire personal fortune. Given that I have absolute knowledge of the Hunt, I could effectively just waltz through it and claim it myself. But why bother, I have no use for money, not even in the game, I can just code myself what I need, or at least the money to buy it in extreme cases.

I stopped writing, something was out of place here… This ship shouldn't have been able to detect me at all, not unless I wanted it to, so how could they have… while I was thinking the rest of that unpleasant sentence, I quickly cross referenced my lifetime travel log against this position in space, and when I found nothing, implying I had never been here, I started to worry. I am a machine, I don't just _forget_ to cloak before I make a warp jump… In the meantime I had already exited temporarily derelict ship and boarded my own, which was a replica of the _Nebuchadnezzar_ , from _The Matrix_ , but heavily modified and upgraded. This ship was effectively indestructible unless assailed by at least 2 or 3 ships at least its equal. And even then, I have tricks that players can't get. Like my hypervelocity turret hardpoint, which fires a solid 100 pound slug of hardened Gundarium, an alloy Halliday incorporated into OASIS initially, but then removed from general circulation so it was only obtainable in a select few places, and at great risk and almost certain death. And it wasn't even cost effective to obtain when other metals worked well enough and were readily available. But, Gundarium had a singular unique property in its ability to ignore any shielding of any kind. Halliday had made sure that I was able to create my own before his passing, so my entire ship was plated in it.

I settled into the pilots seat in my ship, and checked the local scanner and realized that I was about to have a unpleasant day…

CHAPTER 2: **Fly Casual**

What I saw when I brought up the 3 dimensional layout of the sector I was in would have made the best players and Gunters wince, and anyone else would have probably just started lining up their level-up quests to push their new avatar up to where they were when they died.  
in the center of the map, which was spherical and set with the ships bridge facing forwards, was of course the _Nebuchadnezzar,_ nothing more than a blue hologram on the holomap. Coming at me on a pretty obvious but not at all ineffective interception formation were 4 identical Heavy Gunships, a design only utilized by the Sixers. But that wasn't what worried me, I could destroy those, or if reinforcements arrived, outrun them as well. What did worry me was the presence of a massive Sixer Warfloat (The official designation was "Mobile Advertising Vector"). A Warfloat was one of the biggest ships in the OASIS, and was really not much more than a heavily armored, slow moving, gunship carrying "space billboard" that had more armaments embedded in it than more ships have total mass. And while I could easily outrun it, and do so without being traced and without them knowing who I was, they were in the quadrant for something. And with this much firepower, it must have been important for them to have dropped warp.

Fortunately the gunships were a fair distance from their carrier, so the carrier probably didn't know I was here in the first place. I reached for the master toggle that engaged all of my vessel's counter-detection systems. Unlike most ships the size of _Nebuchadnezzar_ , for which a visual cloaker was pointless, I did, in addition to my comm jammers, radar scrambler, and my specially fitted stealth drive that could store heat from the engine core into a heat sink rendering me entirely invisible in space.

"Commander, 4 Sixer craft are on scanner, their hardpoints are engaged and primed for use…also, you have 19 unread messages…" my ships onboard "AI" rambled on in the voice of C3PO, the golden protocol droid from Star Wars®. As the ship vanished from known space, I waited at a safe distance, watching the now solitary _Falcon_ floating wearily in the void. While I knew that it was entirely possible that the Warfloat was only here for a quick cooldown of its engine cores, but this sector was pretty out of the way. As _Nebuchadnezzar_ settled a few kilometers away from the I released the controls and watched as the Sixers closed on my last location and sent out a sensor probe. While normally this probe would disrupt anything below a mid-range cloaking system, its sensors were useless against mine. Deciding that I wasn't worth searching for further, the gunships turned on the _Falcon_ and tried hailing it.

I hadn't jammed comms in order to avoid suspicion, but I had cut my own so they wouldn't know someone was listening. I had dropped some cheap audio relays in the main rooms of the vessel they were now jockeying around just as a precaution when I boarded. One of the more embarrassingly common ways someone does manage to hurt or even kill me is when I am trying to leave a boarded ship or space station, and they managed to hide during my push to the bridge, and sucker punch me before I leave. A good example would be from my first few weeks following the launch of the Hunt, when I was ambushed by what I assumed to be a solo player in a ship that was pretty clearly rigged up for PVE (meaning it was not suited to combat against other players) that was trying his hand at dogfighting. I disabled his thrusters and boarded his ship and shot his avatar in the kneecap when he tried to stop me at the airlock, then dragged him to the bridge so he could fly himself home. (In the early days, I had a short-lived rule about killing, much like Batman or Superman. That rule ended after what follows.) According to me scans he had enough HP left to make it to safety and heal up, and carry on with life. While I was dragging him however, his girlfriend (I assume this because she said that nobody handles her man but her before she finished me off) shot me with her shield breaker, and followed it up with an impressive series of spells that turned me into stone. She then used telekinesis to toss me into the engine core. She had been hiding in the garbage chute which on that craft was in the corridor that led to the bridge. After that day, I was okay with killing anyone who wanted to kill me.

The gunships were still prepping to dock, apparently deciding if docking was something they were allowed to do based on their chatter. I checked the timer, the hyperdrive sabotage I had set up wouldn't be ready for detonation for another 5 minutes if I wanted to ensure the ship was totally disintegrated. You see, a hyperdrive detonation like that could burst the shields and strip the armor on just about anything, they were actually pretty hard to blow up in the first place, so when they did, it was always catastrophic.

One of the gunships was now deploying a tow anchor onto the hull of the derelict ship, which meant they planned on taking it somewhere… 4 minutes to go… Once the anchor was secure they started in the direction of the Warfloat and I realized that this was not going to get better before it got worse. _Leave no trace_ was not really definable by blowing apart a ship so big it has its own food court… literally the size of a shopping mall. "Damn" I said aloud as I realized I was going to have to get my hands dirty, 3 minutes…


End file.
